OldBritAbroad

We went to Crater Lake in the summer - breathtaking! My winter driving skills aren’t up to much though so a winter visit will have to wait for me (though the snow was still there in mid-July!)

As the title says - Hello! (Or should that be Ahoy, mates?) As you might guess from my name, I’m a Brit recently transposed (via New Jersey) to Oregon. 63 years under my belt and retired these last 7 years; married and one 14 year old stepson. Recently rediscovered the many novels to do with the Age of Fighting Sail; O’Brien and Forrester I’d had for a while, currently on the Bolitho saga. I’m not exactly a newbie to wooden ship building (kits) - I made the Billing Bounty over a stretch of time in the 80s/90s, working purely from the plans (pre-Internet days and no handy local library) and without the aid of any proper modelling/woodworking tools. So as you might guess it looked OK from a distance, but up close... not so much! The model has since been lost, which is probably no bad thing! I’ve decided I want to have another go at kit building, after having spent some time recently working with wood & plywood and this time having the luxury of having sufficient spare cash to buy proper tools haha. As a tribute to my new homeland I’ve pretty much settled on the King of Mississippi from Artisana, having looked at some build logs - though I’ve yet to buy it which I’ll probably do in a month or so. (I did have fantasies of building the USS Constitution, but that’s clearly waaay beyond my skill set - and wallet - right now.) if if anyone has recommendations for specific tools, books, DVDs, YouTube etc I’d be very glad to hear them. I’ll be reading the guides on this site and others re planking, rigging and so on but my motto is you can never have enough knowledge! Hugh